Comin’ at Ya!

ESPN enters the third dimension.

The World Cup games on ESPN’s new 3-D TV channel are stunningly in your face.Credit JOHN RITTER

The tallest structure in Bristol, Connecticut, a city of about sixty thousand people some twenty miles west of Hartford, is a twenty-nine-story monolith where Otis Elevator tests new equipment and analyzes the flaws in existing equipment. But the real beacon of the city is more horizontal: ESPN, whose headquarters, a sprawling campus of low buildings, has been there since the cable sports channel was founded, in 1979. Several thousand people work at the Bristol campus, and for the past four years a number of them have been working on bringing 3-D television to the sports-watching audience. On June 11th, ESPN launched a new channel, ESPN 3D, with the first game of the World Cup, between South Africa and Mexico, as its inaugural offering.

ESPN plans to air twenty-five of the World Cup games in 3-D, which sounds cornucopic. But only a thimbleful of viewers will actually be able to see them. To watch, you need a 3-D TV, and special glasses that get the images to your eyes in such a way that your brain can make sense of them, and cable service from one of only three current 3-D providers, DirecTV, Comcast, and A. T. & T.’s U-verse. The June 11th launch, really, was more notional than actual, since 3-D sets started being sold just a few months ago and a negligible number of consumers have them, but it was real enough for ESPN to be able to invite some guests to Bristol to watch the game. In a small room in the building that houses the cafeteria, two sets had been set up for viewers, who included some of ESPN’s technology staff. One set was a seventy-two-inch Samsung model, and one was a Hyundai forty-six-incher, and they were completely different kinds of sets. Yes, two different kinds: it’s Betamax versus VHS, LaserDisc versus SelectaVision, Blu-ray versus HD DVD all over again, except that one technology, the one used in the Samsung set (other manufacturers also utilize it), seems to have triumphed already, not because it’s better but because it’s cheaper to make and cheaper to buy. The Samsung system requires heavy glasses with battery-powered receivers, which Chuck Pagano, ESPN’s executive vice-president of technology, called “Roy Orbison glasses.” In that system, the glasses and your eyes do all the work—receivers in the glasses control the lightning-quick, imperceptible shuttering of each lens, according to the signals sent by the transmitter at the top of the screen. In the Hyundai system, the set does all the work; you merely put on more or less regular-looking, lightweight dark glasses that have polarized lenses. In this model, the screen glass is key in every way, because it’s expensive to manufacture and has a problematic yield—that is, a high rate of having to be thrown away. What has won out is the passive-screen/active-glasses combination—in other words, the cheap set and the expensive glasses.

The ESPN staff in the room didn’t try to oversell the moment; in the future, the network will control every aspect of its telecasts, but FIFA, the World Cup’s governing body, was controlling the feed from the soccer matches, and for now the ESPN people were like expectant fathers being kept out of the delivery room, relegated to the unsatisfying role of hoping for the best. The atmosphere wasn’t quite what it must have been at the 1939 World’s Fair, when the new technology of television was demonstrated to the public. In fact, it wasn’t until a goal was scored that you sensed how 3-D would change television. Actually, it wasn’t until the replay of the goal, when footage from a camera behind the net made it seem as though the ball were coming right toward you. As it threatened to pop out of the screen, it provoked a “Whoa!” from at least one viewer. (Reactions to the game were hard to tease out above the overwhelming, hornet’s-nest din of the fans’ vuvuzelas.)

I tried watching World Cup games four years ago and was preoccupied with the peculiarity of a sport that doesn’t allow the use of arms, which, after all, make up half our complement of excellent sporting appendages (forty per cent, if you include heads), and of the confounding combination of endless minutes of scoreless running around and free kicks that lead to sudden goals. (My analysis, which may not qualify me for on-camera commentary, was “That just doesn’t seem right somehow.”) My expectations for 3-D were low, and they were borne out to some extent: 3-D didn’t enhance the big picture, as it were—all that running around still looked like a lot of running around. But, when the cameras were close to the action, the sense of depth, of people pushing, kicking, fighting for dominance, working, vying, and trying—the sense of action—was intoxicating. Even closeup shots of the crowd were mesmerizing, and not because of the funny hats and the face paint. Real sports fans will love 3-D. A man wearing a jacket with the letters “USA” on the back, who came into the room in Bristol two-thirds of the way through the match, said loudly, “This TV is sick,” and, a minute later, “This is ridiculously cool.” At the end of the match, he said to Pagano, “That was awesome, man. I’m so chuffed about this.” He was the South African actor Sharlto Copley, on campus to do a promotion for the movie “The A-Team”; too bad he’s not available to barnstorm on ESPN’s behalf.

One can imagine that certain sports, such as car racing and golf, wouldn’t be enhanced by 3-D. That was what ESPN operatives assumed, too, but, when they actually played around with camera placement, golf looked great. After the soccer match, I saw a “sizzle reel,” a compilation of clips that showed what 3-D could do for various sports, and one sequence stood out: a golf ball being hit out of a sand trap, in the direction of the camera. (Any reference to “the camera” when you’re talking about 3-D shots should always be understood as “two cameras.”) As the ball blasted out of the trap, the combined effect of the blades of grass, the flying grains of sand, and the ball coming at me was actively seductive, beyond “you are there.” The picture enveloped me, as though the images were as drawn to me as I was to them.

No one knows yet whether the romance of 3-D will ripen into love, and profits—whether anyone other than compulsive first adopters will find it necessary to their lives. What does seem clear is that 3-D will change the way that sports are presented. The sand-trap shot didn’t reflect how golf really looks; and crowds in stadiums aren’t really thrilling to look at. The risk is that, in order to satisfy the craving that this technology engenders in us, sports producers will distort the particular energies of each sport and try to turn every shot into a highlight. Pagano, considering that he’s ESPN’s No. 1 tech guy, didn’t seem overly anxious about the format’s chances of success. ESPN won’t live or die by 3-D. When asked what he likes to watch, Pagano said, “NASA TV. I like the Science Channel—I’m an engineer.”♦